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Comment by jaypaulynice | Hacker News Reader

I was excited for a second, but nothing has changed from what was there already...$300 credit that can be used within 12 months. Am I mistaken?

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Yes, there is an entirely new Always Free Products tier.

https://cloud.google.com/free/

"Use these products for free up to the specified usage limits during and past the free trial. These usage limits do not expire, but are subject to change."

Includes gratis usage of App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Storage, Container Engine, and much much more.

I see "free trial" when I signed up...still not sure what free tier is...

There is a list of GCP products with free quota (some of these have been around for a while in some form but may have changed details, many seem to completely new with this announcement.)

This is in addition to the time-limited free trial credit, and the free quota applies before any payment (including from the trial credit).

Here are the new Always Free usage limits:

https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/always-free-usage-limits

They are (IMO) quite generous. Definitely sufficient to get a good feel for the platform and run some personal workloads.

Disclaimer: Nothing to do with this launch, but I do work on GCP.

I do use Google Compute Engine, but the pricing on the page is extremely confusing...This is for developers who understand how things work so it shouldn't be that confusing. The page you mention has a 'Try it for free' but brings me back to the sign up page and it only mentions the $300 credit for 12 months.

So it's unclear what I'm signing up for...and I need a credit card so Google can confirm I'm not a bot? I have the same problem with using the Cloud platform...I have to search google to find anything like the firewall/networking/billing etc...

The $300 previously only applied for 60 days.

Even a toy project will burn through this in less than 60 days...I was expecting a free tier as in free up to 1GB or something like that...a little misleading because the site makes it sound that.

That's exactly what the Always Free Tier is. 1 free micro instance with 30GB storage for free always. The App Engine is 28 hours per month for free.

It actually says 28 instance hours per day, not 28 instance hours per month. So you can run one instance indefinitely, and still have 4 instance-hours left over for testing or whatever.

Totally that was a typo

There is a permanent free tier for many products like App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, etc in addition to the $300 you can spend for 12 months.

There is an always free tier which, if I'm not wrong, should be free forever.

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